The revamp of the education system in South Africa, is of crucial importance given the new democratic dispensation and the need to transform education. This has primarily • been to enable disadvantaged groups to participate, direct and take control of their own learning and development in the achievement of life-long learning. Thus, all stakeholders have new rights and responsibilities in terms of their input in, and the way in which, educational institutions are run. Given this, I argue that if the community of an institution does not 'own' it and 'drive' it, the development of the institution as an organization will be limited and it will be operating in isolation from the community in which it is situated. I utilized a vocational college on the East Rand, where interviews (a combination of both focus group and semi-structured interviews) were conducted with people whose opinions and ideas were pertinent to my investigation of exploring stakeholders' views of a vocational college operating as a community learning centre. The empirical investigation has been informed by research literature in community education and I draw from the theories offered by Sergiovanni (1993), Emile Durkheim (as quoted by Sergiovanni, 1994) and Townsend (1984), amongst others, to serve as a theoretical framework for this study. The findings of this research has revealed that all stakeholders were in agreement that the vocational college could serve as a community learning centre, providing that the following be implemented: courses for community development be introduced in addition to academic courses; a higher degree of stakeholder participation is initiated; the services of professional be employed to assist students with career guidance and counselling; an alliance with the private sector is forged; the increased employment of staff of colour, and, that the college should not be run as a business venture only. Thus, the stakeholder responses contained valuable information on the views of stakeholders' and the ideas of how the vocational college could operate as a community learning centre. This research was concluded by recommendations that could possibly be used by vocational colleges in its quest to conform to the ideals of a community learning centre.